![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Joe Brainard (1941–1994) was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes. In particular, Brainard broke new ground in using comics as a poetic medium in his collaborations with other New York School poets. He is best known for his memoir I Remember of which Paul Auster said:“It is…one of the few totally original books I have ever read.”
Joe Brainard was born March 11, 1941 in Salem, Arkansas and spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is the brother of painter John Brainard. Brainard became friends with Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan during high school while working on the literary journal The White Dove Review. The 18 year-old Brainard joined the journal as its art editor after fellow Central High classmate Padgett sent Brainard an anonymous Christmas card praising his work. After high school, the artist re-united with the White Dove boys in New York City shortly after leaving the Dayton Art Institute. (Picture: Kenward Elmslie, 1990, by Robert Giard)By 1964, Brainard had already had his first solo exhibition and was ensconced in a circle of friends that included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Alex Katz, Edwin Denby, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Virgil Thomson, John Ashbery, among many others. He also began a relationship with Kenward Elmslie which lasted much of his life, despite having other lovers. He found much success as an artist until he removed himself from the artworld in the early 1980s.
Kenward Elmslie, Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, Westhampton, NY, 1968. Photo by Joe Brainard. Photo courtesy Larry Fagin.
AIDS Quilt
Tattoo, 1972, Pencil and Ink on Paper
( Read more... )
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Brainar
( more paintings )
( Joe Brainard, 1990, by Robert Giard )
( Further Readings )
Donald Jess "Don" Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California. (Picture: Bachardy at 19 – Photo by Carl van Vechten (January 1954))
Born in Los Angeles, California, Bachardy was the life partner of writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he met on Valentine's Day 1953, when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48. They remained together until Isherwood's death in 1986. A number of paperback editions of Isherwood's novels feature Bachardy's pencil portraits of the author. A film about their relationship, titled Chris & Don: A Love Story, was released in 2008. (Picture: Christopher Isherwood)
Romain de Tirtoff (23 November 1892 – 21 April 1990) was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté, the French pronunciation of his initials, R.T. He was a diversely talented 20th-century artist and designer who flourished in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor. Erté's autobiography cataloged his sexual history from age thirteen. He lived with Russian Prince Nicolas Ouroussoff for close to twenty years, up to the Prince's death in 1933.
Robert Miles Parker, an artist and preservationist whose pen-and-ink drawings of urban landscapes displayed a whimsical delight in storefronts, apartment buildings, houses and theaters, died on April 17, 2012, at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood where he could often be found working at a makeshift drawing board in a lawn chair on the sidewalk with a pet Norfolk terrier on a leash sitting patiently beside him. He was 72. 
John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. (Picture: Self Portrait, 1906, oil on canvas, 70 x 53 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence)
Charles Bell (1935 – 1995) was an American Photorealist and Hyperrealist, known primarily for his large scale still lifes.
Arnie Zane (September 26, 1948 – March 30, 1988) was an American photographer, choreographer, and dancer. He is best known as the co-founder and co-artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
The second son of an Italian-Jewish family, Zane was born in the Bronx, New York on September 26, 1948. Zane graduated from State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY) with a degree in theater and art history. Not long afterward, Zane began pursuing an interest in photography. Though he is best known for being a dancer and choreographer, Zane began his career as a photographer. Zane was immensely interested in the human body, particularly its gestures, its movement, and its essence. Critic Jeffrey Green has characterized Zane’s portraits as “breaking down boundaries of race and age”. Zane's exploration of these themes is evidenced in his famous pictorials of a dancing Bill T. Jones. He met Jones, the man who would later become his lifelong partner, while visiting his Alma mater. The story goes that the 22-year-old Zane was immediately enamored of Bill T. Jones (a freshman studying dance and theater at SUNY) when he spied him across campus in 1971. During that spring semester, Zane convinced Jones to travel to Amsterdam with him and explore their burgeoning romantic relationship. After living and working together in Amsterdam, Zane and Jones eventually returned to New York.
Bruce Weber (born March 29, 1946 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania) is an American fashion photographer and occasional filmmaker. He is most widely known for his ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Pirelli, Abercrombie & Fitch, Revlon, and Gianni Versace, as well as his work for Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Elle, Life, Interview, and Rolling Stone magazines.
George Clair Tooker, Jr. (August 5, 1920 – March 27, 2011) was a figurative painter whose works are associated with the Magic realism and Social realism movements. He was one of nine recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2007. (Picture: George Tooker by George Platt Lynes)
Tooker was raised by his Anglo/French-American father George Clair Tooker and English/Spanish-Cuban mother Angela Montejo Roura in Brooklyn Heights and Bellport, New York, along with his sister, Mary Fancher Tooker. Tooker wanted to attend art school rather than college, but ultimately abided by his parents' wishes and majored in English literature at Harvard University, while still devoting much of his time to painting. During 1942, he graduated from college and then entered the Marine Corps but was discharged due to ill-health. He had a long-time partner since 1949, William R. Christopher, who died in 1973. Although he was raised in a religious Episcopalian family he later converted to Catholicism. (Picture: William Christopher by George Platt Lynes)
Beauford Delaney (December 30, 1901 – March 26, 1979) was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford's younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter. (Beauford Delaney, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1953)
Charles Hazelwood Shannon R.A. (26 April 1863 – 18 March 1937), English artist, was born at Sleaford in Lincolnshire, the son of the Rev. Frederick William Shannon, Rector of Quarrington (himself the son of a Royal Navy Captain, Rodney Shannon and his wife Frances Nash), and Catherine Emma Manthorp, the daughter of a surgeon, Daniel Levett Manthorp (and his wife, Elizabeth Mason).
Shannon attended the City and Guilds of London Art School (then known as South London School of Technical Art, formerly Lambeth School of Art), and was subsequently considerably influenced by his lifetime partner Charles Ricketts and by the example of the great Venetians. In his early work he was addicted to a heavy low tone, which he abandoned subsequently for dearer and more transparent colour. He achieved great success with his portraits and his Giorgionesque figure compositions, which are marked by a classic sense of style, and with his etchings and lithographic designs. (Picture: Charles de Sousy Ricketts by George Charles Beresford)
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death from tuberculosis.
Henry Scott Tuke, RA RWS (12 June 1858–13 March 1929), was a British visual artist; primarily a painter, but also a photographer. His most notable work was in the Impressionist style, and he is probably best known for his paintings of nude boys and young men.
Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men. The frank, homosexual eroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.
Robert Mapplethorpe met his lifetime companion Sam Wagstaff in 1972 at a party. Mapplethorpe, whom Wagstaff called his sly pornographer, was also his guide to the gay demimonde of extreme sex and drugs that flourished in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s, Wagstaff gave Mapplethorpe $500,000 to purchase the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where the photographer lived and had his shooting space. Wagstaff died of pneumonia arising from AIDS at his home in Manhattan on January 14, 1987, two years before Mapplethorpe. (Picture: Sam Wagstaff)
Madeleine Vionnet (June 22, 1876 – March 2, 1975) was a French fashion designer. Called the "Queen of the bias cut" and "the architect among dressmakers", Vionnet is best-known today for her elegant Grecian-style dresses and for introducing the bias cut to the fashion world.
Hugh Auchincloss Steers (b. 1962/1963 – March 1, 1995) was a painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum. He died of AIDS at the age of 32. He was the brother of filmmaker Burr Steers. He was the grandson of Hugh D. Auchincloss and Nina Gore. He was the half-nephew of both Gore Vidal and Jackie Kennedy.
Orry-Kelly was the professional name of Orry George Kelly (31 December 1897 – 27 February 1964), a prolific Hollywood costume designer.
Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy (born 21 February 1927) is a French aristocrat and fashion designer who founded The House of Givenchy in 1952. He is famous for having designed much of the personal and professional wardrobe of Audrey Hepburn, as well as clothing for clients such as Jacqueline Kennedy. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1970.
Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (October 9, 1830 - February 21, 1908) was an American sculptor. (Picture: Harriet Hosmer, Engraving by Augustus Robin (1873))
While living in Rome, she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thorvaldsen, Thackeray, George Eliot and George Sand; and she was frequently the guest of the Brownings at Casa Guidi, in Florence. Later she also resided in Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana.
